We’ve Already Seen One Deleted Scene From ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 isn’t even hitting theaters for another two months, and we’ve already seen one scene that isn’t in the movie. Normally outtakes are reserved for the Blu-ray, but director James Gunn came right out and said that one of the promotional teasers features a moment that never made it into the final cut.

It’s this one. A short trailer tease with all the characters sitting around a campfire, chummily getting more and more grossed-out by Drax’s horrible mouth-sounds. Chew with your mouth closed, buddy. Gunn, responding to a fan’s tweet, revealed that he’d had reservations about that scene, and that it’s not in the movie at all.

In fact, it wasn’t even shot as a scene in the first place:

That shot of Groot, for example, is from another part of the movie entirely, and those reaction shots of the other characters could have just been taken from footage of another conversation. It’s a funny scene that totally works to tease the movie, but maybe wasn’t quite worth the effort of trying to fit it into the rest of whichever scene it’s from.

It introduces an interesting situation when it comes to marketing movies. Nowadays, it’s easy to figure out which shots from a film’s trailer were ultimately left on the cutting room floor, or weren’t even meant to be in the movie at all. The most recent, glaring example of this is that one extremely cool shot in the Rogue One trailers of Jyn Erso turning around while the walls of the tunnel she’s in are lit up behind her. Gareth Edwards explained that they got that simply from playing around on set between takes, and when the folks went to cut the trailer, they used that because it was a cool shot. But a lot of people were probably waiting for that shot to come in the movie, and when it didn’t, it felt a little weird.

On the other hand, many movies are criticized nowadays for putting all the fun stuff in their trailers so there’s nothing for the audience to be surprised at later. Superhero and action movies especially are guilty of drilling the jokes into our brains for months beforehand, so that when we finally see them on the big screen we barely even laugh, even if they’re hilarious. Marketing a movie with footage that isn’t actually in the movie is pretty bold, but it also leaves more of the fun stuff to be discovered later.